2 much Hamburger!!!

this has been like the best weekend ever...well...it's still in the process of being the best week ever...the best part hasn't happened yet...but the last two nights have been pretty swell...Neil Hamburger did two consecutive shows at Stop 345 (this newish, hip, underground comedy club...pretty lame, but of course that goes with the whole nature of being a comedy club...as stand up comedy is rarely ever remotely funny...) the opening acts for both shows were the same...the first was this old guy that's supposed to be an "elvis tribute artist"...he told a few bad jokes between singing bad elvis songs a capella...next was a "local boy done good" or whatever...Moe Alexander...this really big fat black guy who tells it like it is and is really shocking and confronts our conservative reservations 'cuz it's a fucked up world we're living in and we've gotta offend everyone and pretty much his whole act was talking about how he does all this...and both nights he "confronted" me...the first night (both times we were sitting right in the front row) i was just sitting there staring at him not laughing because he's not funny...and he pointed to me and said "you're an idiot aren't you?" and i just said "yeah" and kept sitting there...the next night he said something about the audience needing to participate and if they wouldn't he'd get naked and he was wearing a thong and he'd rub is ass on our heads...he singled me out saying something about that, i forget what and i just calmly said "that'd be great"...then he said something about fisting a midget, i forget what...i made some other bored comment to that as well (i wasn't heckling him or anything, he had singled me out and was talking directly to me...) he asked me if i'd ever had sex with a woman and i said "no" then if i ever had sex with myself and i said "yeah, often" or something like that...then he made a comment about that's why my hands were hidden or something (i had my arms folded at the time) and i just said "yeah, i'm masturbating"...i dunno, it was just funny 'cuz he was trying to act like he's all shocking and i was just replying in a really calm and bored voice...and both shows he kept saying all the people who weren't laughing had to be uptight white people or really religious, etc...i don't think it ever could have crossed his mind that he's just not funny...and there was so much he said that had the potential of being funny, content-wise, but he just had absolutely not delivery skills...it takes a special breed of bad comedian to make a joke about his mom's stomach cancer not be funny...but anyway, Neil Hamburger was great (oh, and it's a bad idea to write a post while listening to one of his cds...pretty hard to concentrate on the writing...so sorry if what i'm saying here is fragmented and not making much sense...i'm only half paying attention to anything i'm saying here...) both shows and when i saw him a few months ago had a LOT of material in common...but he's so great it doesn't matter...and so much of it's how he tells the jokes more than the jokes themselves, blah blah...but i'm not trying to do a review or anything like that...the first night i hit the merch table and got a t-shirt and his Live at the Phoenix Greyhound Park dvd...and i got a button for free...and running out of money i wanted 'til the next night to get 2 of his cds: Laugh out Lord and Left for Dead in Malaysia as well as the Warm Voices Rearranged: Anagram Record Reviews book that "he" wrote (Gregg Turkington and uh...another guy whose name i forget...) but yeah...the shows were great...

yesterday Amanda was having this special discount of 40% off her work so i went up there and picked out a few books...she works at Brentanos (a shittly little store in the mall with a very limited selection) but i was able to find a few things worth buying...i got: The Stranger (Albert Camus), Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky), and Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)...and the day before Amanda brought me a present: a schnauzer calendar!!! oh, and my Naked Lunch dvd(s) arrived friday night as well...uh, The Family Ghost practiced yesterday...and it went well...oh yeah, the other day i finished reading The Soft Machine (William S. Burroughs, of course...) and started on A Confederate General from Big Sur (Richard Brautigan), a book i bought years ago but hadn't gotten around to reading yet 'cuz my reading as of late has been pretty sparse...i mean, up until i started working at MCI...well i think i'd better stop now...i've run out of stuff to say and the stuff i did say hasn't been very coherent anyways...oh yeah, but tonight Xiu Xiu is playing!!! i'm fucking excited about that...yeah...